


The Madonna

by VanillaMostly



Category: Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 00:29:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2793200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VanillaMostly/pseuds/VanillaMostly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A woman who never stopped haunting Snowman. It isn't Oryx.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Madonna

**Author's Note:**

  * For [corialis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/corialis/gifts).



 

The children asks once, catching him off-guard. They are a curious lot, of course, he had to field millions of questions before about trees and birds and the sky, about the weird state of his “second skin” and the “feathers” growing bushier on his face. But never about _this_ , although he shouldn’t be surprised. It isn’t exactly an unoriginal question.

“Oh Snowman, oh Snowman, where is your mother?”

A question he has heard a little too many times from the CorpSeCorps, uttered with an ulcerous air of pretentious patience. _Appreciate the cooperation, son. Attaboy._ A question he’s heard from his lovers at one time or another, a slip of the tongue before they’d see the expression on his face, and they’d crumble and feel oh so bad and, _oh it’s alright Jimmy, we don’t have to talk about it._ A question Snowman has wondered about himself. He never voices it or puts it into coherent words, but those postcards, from Moscow or Brazil or Thailand, flashing through his mind: of course he wonders. The sacred mother-and-child bond, and all. Poets wrote about it, singers sang about it.

Snowman looks at the children, at their innocent green gaze. He wants to laugh and tell them that he doesn’t know, he truly doesn’t know. “I don’t have a mother,” in the end he tells them. It’s not a lie. Snowman doesn’t have a mother; Jimmy does. Did.

But maybe that isn’t the smartest choice, because that starts another wave of questions.

“No mother, Snowman?”

“Why?”

“How were you born then?”

“Did you come down from the sky too, like Crake?”

“Enough,” he says, rolling over and waving a hand. “Leave me. I’m tired.”

They must have heard the fatigue in his voice, which he didn’t have to fake. The subject of his mother does make him tired. Drains him of emotion in some mysterious way, which is ironic given how he seemed to have done the same to her, back then as Jimmy, not Snowman.

Anyhow, the children obediently scatter off, cheerful and pleasant as always, and grumpy, weary old Snowman is left by himself, thinking of the peanut-butter-and-jelly lunches, the magenta bathrobe, those last words, blue eyes burning into his. _I love you. Don’t let me down._

“Have I done it, Mom?” he asks out loud. “Did I make you proud?”

Mosquitoes buzz. He reaches for the Scotch.

 

 

 

* * *

**The Madonna**

* * *

 

 

The more years she spent out here, the more she thought about Jimmy. What was he doing? How was he? She counted in her head: he must be twenty-three this year… His birthday was last month, was it not? This made her more ashamed than anything. Back then, she could never remember his birthday; not because she didn’t know the date, but because she never kept track of time, lived in a fog-like world where each day was the same. She attributed this to her depression. But she couldn’t tell herself that depression was the excuse for everything. It wasn’t.

Did he still hate her?

*

She found ways to send him postcards, paying strangers to do so from around the world. She had friends and acquaintances who would do it for free, but she couldn’t risk placing them in danger. Or, she laughed, thinking of this ( _you and your pious shit,_ her ex-husband would sneer at her), more like she couldn’t trust them. They knew too much. Another instance where her ex-husband would gloat _I told you so_ , if he knew. Money was the way of life. You could rely on money more than you could rely on friendship or trust.

She signed each one _Aunt Monica_. Jimmy would know they were from her. He was a smart boy. He’s got her brains, after all.

*

“How old is he?” she asked the woman next to her.

The woman was carefully pouring an allotment of bottled water onto her scarf. Bottled water in the pleebands was a luxurious good, it was a wonder how the woman got her hands on it. There were ways, though. There always were, when you were desperate enough. “He’s ten,” the woman answered. She dabbed the scarf on her son’s feverish red face, bowing her head, and Sharon knew not to say anything further. What could she say anyway, to this woman about to lose her son. Not like Sharon, who had lost hers of her own will.

*

I did the right thing. I couldn’t have stayed there, I couldn’t stay there knowing what they were doing, eating their food, living under their roof. I had to leave.

I had to.

( _I could have taken him with me, though. I could have tried.)_

*

It was funny, really. When she had been living with Jimmy, she didn’t love him. She didn’t, she will admit that. She wasn’t going to lie to herself, like her husband did. Just ignored the unpleasantness of reality and truth, shut it out to make himself feel good, feel comfortable. She wanted to be… how had she phrased it, that time she noticed this about Jimmy’s friend? Oh yes. _Intellectually honorable._

A strange kid that boy had been. Not like Jimmy at all. That boy had seemed so grown-up, too much so for his age and body; tall and thin, dressed in black, he’d reminded her of (this was quite silly) a vampire. Sharon had liked him, found the sharpness and directness of his conduct refreshing. And his intelligence was obvious, even from the one brief conversation they had.

Of course---and this was something she learned later---that boy, Glenn, turned out to have been connected to God’s Gardeners, too. Thinking of it now, Sharon wondered how much Glenn knew. If the fact that he befriended Jimmy was just a coincidence.

 _You and your paranoia,_ her ex-husband would sneer. _Everything’s a goddamn conspiracy to you._

 _Isn’t it though, my dear?_ Sharon thought. She imagined inhaling a cigarette and blowing it into his face. He always hated that.

* 

She had envied Dolores, the live-in nanny from the Philippines. She was jealous of how easily Jimmy took to Dolores, how easily Dolores hugged and kissed Jimmy, how Dolores made even changing diapers look fun.

“It’s always hard at first,” Dolores had told her once, as if reading Sharon’s mind.

Sharon didn’t answer, secretly overcome with irrational resentment at Dolores and her understanding smiles, her kindness and genuine love. At how some women could fit motherhood so perfectly, and other women barely so. Was it a mis-wiring of neuronal pathways, an incompatibility of receptors? Maybe OrganInc Farms should look into developing that. A cure for defective mothers. Ha.

* 

She had done her doctorate in Immunogenetics and defended her dissertation on protein mutations in anti-immunogenic mice liver cells. That got her recruited to work on the same sort of thing, but for pigoons. She’d been so proud and happy then. Only twenty-four, fresh out of grad school, and her future was set. A great deal luckier than many of her classmates.

He had been at the lab for a few years already, so was told to show her the ropes. It wasn’t a very interesting story. They dated for a while, she got pregnant, they got married. She had Jimmy.

* 

Her own mother had died in the same flood that drowned Old New York and much of the East Coast. Her father had fended for a while, but passed away her third year of grad school from liver failure.

It probably wasn’t a coincidence that her father started binge-drinking after her mother passed, and that Sharon started chain-smoking after she quit her job.

To each their own evils.

*

It wasn’t just Jimmy that made her unsatisfied, restless, unhappy. She hated her job, so she quit, but after she quit, she missed it. She didn’t miss her employer, that was for sure, but she missed the work. She missed the science, the feeling of being busy. She missed the thinking, the troubleshooting, the breakthrough.

But she’d thought that once she quit working, she could find salvation in her son. She wanted Jimmy to fill up the hole in her heart.

Kind of a lot to expect from a six-year-old but, well, that was how it went.

* 

She would be allowed a few last words. They still cared about things like that, although she suspected it was more for viewership than any respect for her “rights.”

She went through many reiterations, there in the darkness of her cell.

_I’m sorry. Forgive me._

_I wish you knew…_

_You don’t have any reason to give a shit what I say, but---_

In the end, when the blindfold fell, and she turned to the camera, what slipped from her mouth was half-planned, half-not. The first half was. She had to mention Killer, to signal it was really her. The second half---

_I love you. Don’t let me down._

They slipped from her lips, unbidden. She almost cried; if they’d given her a moment longer, maybe she would have.

* 

 _Don’t be like me,_ was what she had really meant by her very last four words. _Live, love, without regrets. Be free._

  


**Author's Note:**

> I went a bit off-the-prompt I feel like, since this isn't entirely Jimmy-centric. Hope you like it though! Jimmy and his mom's relationship was just the saddest thing in the book, for me. (I also didn't read the 2 other books in the trilogy that well, haha, only skimmed them. So if something contradicts stuff revealed later on, that's why.) Anyway, happy holidays and thanks for prompting Oryx and Crake. Love this book. (P.S. This was my first Yuletide and it was a lot of fun :))


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